The March edition of Comment magazine—yes, I'm a little late in picking up on this—has three articles dealing with each aspect of the biblical story: creation, fall, and redemption. Understanding the biblical narrative in this way is characteristic of the school of thought known as neocalvinism, which Comment roots itself in. All the pieces in this three-part series are excellent, and all worth your time (as is Comment as a whole—incidentally, Comment publishes five times more material online than in print if you wanted to read it on a regular basis). A taste of each piece follows.

First, Al Wolters writes on a biblical view of creation:

The first thing most people think of in connection with creation is the so-called 'natural world'—that is, the physical and biological world. We think of stars and galaxies as well as molecules and atoms, of trees and flowers as well as birds and beasts. But that is a very limited view of creation. In the biblical view, creation is everything which God has ordained to exist, what he has put in place as part of his creative workmanship. To be sure, this includes the great variety of physical entities and processes, and the enormous diversity of flora and fauna that God has created 'according to their kind,' but it also encompasses much more. Creation includes such human realities as families and other social institutions, the presence of beauty in the world, the ability to appreciate that beauty, the phenomena of tenderness and laughter, the capacity to conceptualize and reason, the experience of joy and the sense of justice. An almost unimaginable variety of objects, institutions, relationships and phenomena are part of the rich texture of God's creation.

Then David Naugle addresses the consequences of the fall:

[The fall] is the second 'act' in the overall narrative of the Scriptures, the next major theme in a biblical view of life and the world. First, there is the good news of creation, but now we have the bad news of the fall. It introduces fundamental conflict into the biblical drama, which must be resolved before God's story ends. It shows, contrary to other worldviews, that evil is not rooted in creation itself, but in the moral rebellion of the human race against the divine authority of the holy God. I sometimes call this episode the 'uncreation' because of the damage it did to God's very good world: how it twisted his intentions for humanity, for our knowing and loving and culture-making, and for all the earth.

And finally Jamie Smith paints a wonderful portrait of God's all-encompassing redemption:

Our good Creator has not left us to our own devices. While we ruptured the plenitude of creative love, our condescending God has also ruptured our brass heaven, along with our desire to enclose ourselves in immanence, appearing in the flesh—our flesh—as the image of the invisible God. Jesus of Nazareth appears as the second Adam who models for us what it looks like to carry out that original mission of image-bearing and cultivation. The Word became flesh, not to save our souls from this fallen world, but in order to restore us as lovers of this world—to (re)enable us to carry out that creative commission. Indeed, God saves us so that—once again, in a kind of divine madness—we can save the world, can (re)make the world aright. And God's redemptive love spills over in its cosmic effects, giving hope to this groaning creation.

So our redemption is not some supplement to being human; it's what makes it possible to be really human, to take up the mission that marks us as God's image bearers. Saint Irenaeus captures this succinctly: 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.' Redemption doesn't tack on some spiritual appendage, nor does it liberate us from being human in order to achieve some sort of angelhood. Rather, redemption is the restoration of our humanity, and our humanity is bound up with our mission of being God's co-creative culture-makers.

Be sure to read all of the articles in their entirety. It is this three-part framework (alternatively construed as wonder, heartbreak, and hope) that forms the point of view from which Comment looks at the world, a point of view which, my friend and the magazine's editor Gideon Strauss writes, manifestly reveals the love of the triune God. This love "evokes—from our whole person and in unity with the whole people of God—a life of worship, a love of our neighbours, and a respectful caring and disclosure of all of creation. Lives ordered by the love of God are ordered well, and can be lived well."

Abraham Kuyper, in that oft-quoted dictum, rightly declares that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our worldview needs this truth as its foundation. We do not begin to live our lives well, to borrow Gideon's words, unless we begin with the recognition of His total claim over all of creation and His holistic work of redemption. Indeed, as Cornelius Van Til once said, "Man cannot be man unless God is God."

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Foppe Ten Hoor was a Dutch immigrant to America, arriving in 1896 and within a few years assuming the role of professor of systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There had been a large influx of Dutch immigrants to America between roughly 1850-1900 (successive waves of immigrants would arrive in the following decades as well), many of whom came out of Reformed churches in the Netherlands. New immigrants found establishing themselves in America to be a challenge—not only did many of the battles that divided the Reformed churches back in the motherland carry over to America, but the Dutch were forced to wage an entirely different (and formidable) battle against the encroaches of American culture into their churches and their lives.

James Bratt writes of this struggle in his excellent book, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture, highlighting Ten Hoor's concerns in particular regarding the gradual Americanization of both the Dutch immigrants and the Reformed churches they established. It would have been difficult to anticipate the challenges they would face in the new world, and soon the Dutch found themselves in a situation which B.K. Kuiper, a contemporary of Ten Hoor, describes as follows:

The overwhelmingly great majority of our fellow-citizens are indifferent or in part even antagonistic to these principles [of the Reformed]. Almost all educational institutions from the highest to the lowest; almost the entire press, daily newspapers as well as periodicals, not only the secular but the religious as well; our courts, our legislatures, organized politics and social life, the pulpits themselves; and therefore almost all public opinion stands arrayed in battle-order against the small circle that yet holds too and nail to the Reformed world-and-life conception.

Like many immigrants in this period, the Dutch had looked to America as a sort of promised land and had been told that there they would find a genuinely Christian land, one that had been spared the athiestic and revolutionary turmoil that had shaped Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. What they found upon arrival, however, was a Christianity that was shallow, individualistic, and concerned with consequence rather than principle.

Ten Hoor, with many other Reformed leaders, were not optimistic about the new context they found themselves in nor the influence this new culture would have on the Reformed churches. Ten Hoor noted the salient features of American Christianity:

doctrinal indifference, passion for 'programs,' impulsive innovation. Evangelicals replaced catechism with Sunday School, Bible study with prayer meetings, doctrinal sermons with topical discourses. Having sacrificed the intellectual in Christianity, they had to resort to the emotions of the ignorant—revivals—or to the tastes of the respectable—'sound organization' pleasing the businessman and 'social service' pleasing his wife. In each case they imitated 'the world,' whether or mass entertainment, of big business with its mergers and boards, or of charities with their assorted benevolences.

In his estimation, it all boiled down to subjectivity and "I-sovereignty." Americans had a remarkable disdain for authority, unless it was their own. For Ten Hoor it seemed that especially confessional authority, but even Scriptural authority, played a secondary role to the whims of the individual. The end goal in American Christianity was not God's glory, but human happiness, reflected in what Ten Hoor observed to be the basic question that animated the American spirit—"Does it pay?"

For Ten Hoor and the rest of the Dutch Reformed in America, then, the challenge was to resist the influence of American culture on Reformed spirituality and theology. How to resist that challenge, however, was a source of constant and heated debate.

This is interesting to me for two reasons. First, being the grandson of Dutch immigrants on both sides of my family, the story of the Dutch Reformed immigrants in North America is my own story. Second, having now spent several months studying the history of Christianity in America, I find Ten Hoor to be very perceptive in his assessment of American Christianity. Growing up, I often thought that the struggle of the Dutch to preserve a culture and tradition was borne out of nothing more than a lingering superiority complex (those of you who have had the misfortune of hearing a Dutchman proclaim, "If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much!" will undoubtedly feel the same).I have come to realize and appreciate, however, that this struggle goes far deeper than just culture and tradition.

In the end, this was the struggle to preserve a holistic worldview that confessed the lordship of Christ over all. Granted, no unified answer ever came from the Dutch on how to deal with the challenge of American Christianity—some content to withdraw into secluded enclaves that shut the world out entirely, some taking up in earnest the cause of Abraham Kuyper and the neocalvinists to transform culture, and many in between—but there was broad consensus on the problems and concerted efforts among the different parties to address them. Recognizing that to be a Christian meant not only living as a Christian, but also thinking as one, the Dutch were often known for their intellect and wisdom in cultivating both the mind and the heart (the Christian school movement is one such example of these efforts).

The Dutch were well aware that it was a great struggle to be a Christian in this new land. Because Ten Hoor's apt description of American Christianity remains largely true for today, there is much to glean from the insights of the Dutch and their collective struggle to live in a way that acknowledged the sovereignty of God over every part of life. Be sure to read Bratt's book for a much more detailed look at the Dutch experience in America.

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Henry R. Van Til (the nephew of Cornelius) is often credited with the remarkable insight, "Culture is religion externalized." However, if you read the following portion from the chapter on the relationship of religion and culture in his book, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, you will find out that those words are actually a paraphrase of a quote properly attributed to Paul Tillich.

At any rate, Van Til makes the crucial point here that our deepest religious convictions penetrate our entire being and form the axis on which our lives rotate. Every human being is a religious being at the very core. Says Van Til,

It is...more correct to ask what the role of culture is in religion than to put the question the other way around, as Hutchison does, 'What is religion's role in culture?' For man, in the deepest reaches of his being, is religious; he is determined by his relationship to God. Religion, to paraphrase the poet's expressive phrase, is not of life a thing apart, it is man's whole existence. Hutchison, indeed, comes to the same conclusion when he says, 'For religion is not one aspect or department of life beside the others, as modern secular thought likes to believe; it consists rather in the orientation of all human life to the absolute'. Tillich has captured the idea in a trenchant line, 'Religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion.'

The Westminster Shorter Catechism maintains at the outset that man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. However other-worldly this may sound to some, Presbyterians have interpreted this biblically to mean that man is to serve God in his daily calling, which is the content of religion. This service cannot be expressed except through man's cultural activity, which gives expression to his religious faith. Now faith is the function of the heart, and out of the heart are the issues of life (Prov. 4:23). This is the first principle of a biblically oriented psychology.

No man can escape this religious determination of his life, since God is the inescapable, ever-present Fact of man's existence. God may be loved or hated, adored or debased, but he cannot be ignored. The sense of God (sensus deitatis) is still the seed of religion (semen religionis). All of primitive religion is corroboration of the cry of the Psalmist, "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence?" (Ps. 139:7).

And it is for this reason I steadfastly maintain that life is religion. There simply is no way around it.

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The words that follow belong to David J. Bosch, the renowned South African missiologist, who initially had them published in the December 1979 issue of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa. This is the kind of thing that simply electrifies me.

As Lord, Jesus was given 'all power in heaven and on earth' (Matt. 28:18). He is therefore repeatedly referred to as 'Saviour of the world' (John 4:42; 1 John 4:14). 'All things were created by him, and all things exist through him and for him,' says Paul (Rom. 11:36). It is the purpose of God to bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head (Eph. 1:10).

All this means that the Kingdom of God (or the Lordship of Christ) is without boundaries. Christ is Lord of all. Naturally, his Lordship his not yet openly and finally manifested. The ultimate is yet to come. We live in the penultimate. We still wait for the day of which Rev. 11:15 speaks, when, as it affirms 'the kingdoms of this world are to become the Kingdom of God,' when God 'will be all in all' (1 Cor. 15:28). For the time being Christ's Lordship over the universe is anonymous; he is not recognised and acclaimed as Lord.

We should, however, not deduce from this that God has handed the universe over to the counter-forces. He is not an absentee Lord whose estate is being ransacked by his enemies during his absence. To be sure, the enemy is active in God's world, extremely active, but we should never allow ourselves to accept that this world belongs to the enemy. If areas of the universe indeed appear to be enemy-occupied territory, let us never for one moment forget that they are occupied illegally, by a usurpur. Satan does not belong in this world. The earth is the Lord's.

If we forget this we commit the same mistake as those Christians who argue...that we had better withdraw from the world into a religious enclave. The terrible thing these Christians are doing is to grant legality to the spurious claim of the enemy that this world belongs to him, not to God! And when Jesus said to Pilate, 'My Kingdom is not of this world', his words should not be understood as meaning that his Kingdom is entirely other-worldly. It should rather, within the context of John's gospel, be understood to mean, 'My Kingdom does not operate according to the rules of this world which have been adulterated by Satan. My Kingdom is unique. But this does not make it other-worldly.' Did Jesus not, after all, teach his disciples to pray, 'Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?' Therefore, if we Christians surrender this world to Satan, we play right into his hands. And we betray the Lordship of Christ.

I will leave you to draw out the practical implications of Bosch's excellent words. They are legion.

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Byron Borger has followed up his last post (which I mentioned here) with another post today building on what he previously said. I highly recommend you read his latest post as well, in which he speaks extensively and encouragingly of Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's latest book, Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview. I have yet to read it myself, but having studied under Goheen I have already been deeply impacted by many of the ideas in this book. Borger, in the middle of the post, again speaks of why worldview study is so important.

[Worldview study] is not just for eggheads or intellectuals. We all long for coherence and integrated lives. We are not content with a narrow faith and the more attentive we are to the Bible, the more we come away informed by this comprehensive claim that Christ makes over all of life. Such coherence and integrity leads to joy. It is as simple as that: life lived out of a distinctively and intentional Christian worldview is more complicated (everything matters) and demanding (we cannot conform to the ways of the world, not in voting, or shopping, in sexual matters or business matters or recreational matters.) Yet, in that cost of discipleship comes joy. I think Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life touched something deep about all this, and it is revealing just how popular that was a few years back. In this postmodern world, we sense things unravelling, and we yearn for meaning, purpose, direction. A comprehensive framework for understanding things makes for a purposeful life. It makes for a joyful life. It makes for a righteous life.

Click here to read the rest of his post, and here to read another review of the book. Borger's last two posts are well worth your time, and his recommendations are well worth the space on your bookshelves.

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